Matthias Kempka
Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code in REST APIs
REST APIs that serve their content via HTTP have limited options for authentication. One of these is request signing. With a little bit of custom specification the standard approach HMAC can be …
API Key Authentication in a REST API with JAX-RS
The designer of a new REST APIs soon comes across the problem of authentication. He has a number of standardized or custom methods to choose from. In this blog entry I want to outline design and …
Estimations in the Face of Psychology: The Anchoring Effect
Estimations play a central role in every commercial software project. Whenever a feature is discussed, planned or scheduled the need for an estimation is not far. In this blog entry, I want to …
File access during test execution in OSGi projects
Unit tests should be small in scope and fast in execution. Shooting for tests like these during development, I am getting reliable and ready-to-use code units fairly quickly. Once I have such a unit …
More tests are not always good - Why you should stop at 100% test coverage
As I started in the programming industry almost a decade ago, writing tests at all was still a fairly new thing for many developers. Having been one of the early TDD advocates in my social …
Execution of JUnit Tests in a Single-Sourced Application
One strength of Eclipse is the possibility to use the same code on desktop clients as well as in web clients. The same application can run as an installed desktop application and in the web browser, …
Welcome back NoClassDefFoundError in the Eclipse IDE
Situation 1: “Dad, where is my yellow road roller?” - “Let me see, son..” Looks around. “I have no idea. Are you sure you didn’t leave it at grandmas?” Situation 2: “Dad, where is my green …
Semantic Versioning for Eclipse Developers
Eclipse/OSGi has a strict versioning scheme consisting of 4 parts, separated by dots. This is well-known to Eclipse developers, and thus in the Eclipse/OSGi world the versioning problems are solved. …
A Rule to Test Them All (At Once)
Unit tests often stop being useful where concurrency is involved. A special case is thread safety which can be tested relatively easily with the use of a simple JUnit rule. Suppose middle earth wants …
How high can you raise the bar?
You have read the books. You are a clean coder. You know your language, your tools and libraries and you know exactly what matters: Well crafted software, steadily adding value, and of course you are …
Keeping Target Control
Shortly after you have created your Eclipse-based project, you must choose a target platform. The use of target platform definitions is now widespread but you can define these in several ways, the …
Focusing on the Problems
The “Problems” view in Eclipse lists errors and warnings in the workspace. In its default settings this view is not entirely helpful, but it is highly customizable. Today I want to show you how you …
RWTBot
Recently I started working at a headless client for RAP 2.0 with the following aims: Allow functional testing of RAP/RWT applications. Allow stress testing of RAP/RWT applications, working together …
Creating an effective archive with labels
Paper is tree-based Developer documentation, if available, is a great thing. It is even better if you can actually find the piece of information you are looking for. Most documentation I have seen is …
Don't miss the Eclipse Day in Delft
Gather together, learn what others in the Eclipse space do, which tools they use and how they use them. Come join us on the Eclipse Day in Delft on 27th of September. I myself will share a success …
Workplace safety
“This is just about getting some numbers.” “Oh, and we need some basic UI, nothing fancy though.” “We should have some alternative storage or exporting options, you know, keep it simple, just export …
Does your application have working brakes?
Suppose your friend got a new motorcycle. The first questions are probably like the following. What horsepower does it have? How fast can it go? How long does it take from 0 to 100km/h? How about 0 to …
Eclipse Testing Day 2012 Submissions Open
This year marks the third Eclipse Testing Day, where the community gathers for a day focusing on testing with, for and at Eclipse. The event takes place on September 05 in Darmstadt. The general theme …
My Eclipse Testing Day
At September 7th I attended the Eclipse Testing Day 2011. In the morning we heard several talks about various testing strategies in different commercial products. Alexander Klein from BeOne held an …
Announcing a full featured PDE Build example from a Git repository
I set up a githup repository that gives a working example for a PDE product build from a git repository. It is meant to ease the pain of setting up new builds by having a working template that just …
An almost perfect Test Suite
During RCP application development the creation and maintenance of a Test Suite is a common annoyance. While solutions exist that we can live with, the current state of test suites is ennoyance enough …
Capture screenshot on failing SWTBot tests
Sometimes functional tests fail. If they do, I not only want to see the test and the error message, I also want a screenshot of the application in the state during the failing test. I was astonished …
Register now for the Eclipse Testing Day
On September 8th, the Eclipse Testing Day takes place in Darmstadt. I have the honor of giving the opening talk about what I call finding the scope for a test. A lot of programmers seem to have …
How to structure two dozen Eclipse workspaces
I have tons of Eclipse workspaces. The last time I counted it was around 24, but it actually changes on a daily basis. With some of my workspaces I want to have a similar IDE as with others, but some …
A new era of managing Eclipse installations has begun
Back in the old days, maintaining an Eclipse installation was easy. You just downloaded the Eclipse; it included the JDK and you used this Eclipse on all your workspaces. But the number of useful …
OSGi Import Package and Split Package Woes
Since OSGi developers gained influence in the Eclipse development and trainings discussion… many words have been said in favour of declaring dependencies via Import-Package instead of Require-Bundle. …
Nifty Progress Reporting in RCP Applications
I don’t (always) like the ways Eclipse provides me to do long running operations. So I created another way with a nicer UI. With the Jobs framework the Eclipse IDE provides some means for long running …
Very basic dependencies
We recently moved our continuous integration builds to a new server. The builds are set up self-contained or have only little dependencies to files outside their workspace. So it shouldn’t be a big …
First blog entry: Hello world
This semester my wife gives a lecture in theoretical computer science at the KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). The current topic is decidability and therefor the students learn about the …